Patent and Trademark Office (PTO)

See the following -

FOSS And Patents - Peer Collaboration As A Key To Countering Patent Risk, Guest Blog By Clark Asay

Clark Asay | Outercurve Foundation | February 26, 2013

In an earlier post I suggested that third-party patents pose the most significant risk of using free and open source software (FOSS). The risk boils down to this: with limited exceptions, someone with a patent that reads on FOSS can prevent anyone else from using that FOSS, even if you or somebody else independently created the software... Read More »

Join EFF’s Efforts To Keep 3D Printing Open

Julie Samuels | Electronic Frontier Foundation | October 24, 2012

Thanks to the open hardware community, you can now have a 3D printer in your home for just a few hundred dollars [...]. This incredible innovation is possible because the core patents covering 3D printing technologies started expiring several years ago, allowing projects such as RepRap to prove what we already knew—that openness often outperforms the patent system at spurring innovation. Read More »